Sunday was a busy day for me, but since it was also Mother’s Day I had to delay this post till now. I had 3 things to post about but I think I chose the best for the day. The other one is coming, but I put on the back burner as it isn’t important. The story below contains a couple of big pictures and a movie, so just give it a second to load up. Don’t worry it’s worth it.

Now on with the show.

I woke up Sunday morning around noon. While dragging my feet around the house something caught my eye from the window. Normally this doesn’t happen as I live on the 5th floor. Curiously I walked to the window and saw a huge crane there. I was kinda shocked as it was on level with my window and only a few feet away. Picture of the crane is below.

I asked myself “What the fuck is a huge ass crane doing outside my window. I need answers!” I ran to my room and grabbed my camera, which luckily was charged. I opened the window and took a couple of shots and then looked down to see this.

Kinda shocking to see a camera crew down there too. Did a cat get stuck in the tree or something? The answer was no. After getting dressed and eating breakfast, I went downstairs to see what was up. Turns out they were shooting a TV commercial (so the building guard says) and were using our building as the set. Now I don’t know exactly what the TV commercial was all about, I do know that in the commercial the “actress” and the “actor” are on the roof of a building, she flips out or something and jumps(I can’t confirm that she dies, pity). He runs down the stairs and tries to catch her (Taiwan logic again for you, they are on the roof of a 12 story building, she jumps and he expect to beat her to the ground by taking the stairs).

Now you would think they would of informed us they were gonna be doing this, maybe even pay us. But no, this is Taiwan and logical things just don’t happen like that. Since they inconvenienced me, by blocking the back door of the building and shocking me with a huge ass crane outside of my window, and not hiring me to join them, I felt that I had to annoy the hell out of them. So being clever as I am, I did the only thing that was legal and they couldn’t complain about. I followed them around closely taking many many pictures, which can be found on my flickr account.

Below is when I was on the roof and they were filming the scene where she jumps. As you can see from the photo they used a dummy(no a real one) tied to a string and thrown off the building.

Since the real action was downstairs and after I took some beautiful aerial photos, I followed them down.

Downstairs they were setting up shots of him running down the stairs to catch her. You should of been there to see the actor act. I was hilarious! Lucky for you, I was there and took some movies of him. They must of did about 20 takes of him bursting out of the door looking confused and seeing where she was so he can catch her. Below is a movie I shot of that scene. The parts I like the most is when the director uses English to sound more professional. If you listen closely you can hear her say “Action!” and “Cut!” I also enjoyed the actors performance. It has to be seen to truly be enjoyed. Just don’t hurt yourself when your laughing. Enjoy.

On the other side of the set they were setting up for the “fall shot”. The true reason for the crane was to hook up the actress to a line, and film her pretend fall. While some of the crew were setting up, the other ones were goofing around with the dummy they filmed earlier.

Finally after about45 minutes of waiting they finished setting up the crane and hooked the actress up. If you check out my flickr pictures you can see a lot more perv shots of the crew hooking up the wires to her. I was kinda jealous that I didn’t get a chance to get hooked up, since it looked like a lot of fun. I could of pretended I was Batman and start doing a bunch of flying kicks and shit. Here is a picture of the “actress” hooked up and swing around.

At this point I was getting pretty bored and I figured I had annoyed them enough. So I walked around the “set” one last time, and I found the storyboard for the commercial. Most of it was covered and I didn’t want to touch it, so I took a couple of pictures of the visible part. If you look closely at the last scene you can see that he tries to catch her, but being the dumb ass he is, totally misses. So I am pretty sure she dies, but they can do some silly crap in editing to make her live. Maybe the commercial is for a vitamin, so she somehow bounces off the pavement and survives. I can’t even start to understand how their minds work. So check out the storyboard below and then go look at my flickr set devoted to the shoot. If anyone out there has any more info, please leave it in the comments.

I hope I get a chance to see the real thing. I have a cable line hooked up to my computer, so there is a chance that I can record it. If I do, there will surely be a follow up post and I’ll post the video here.

UPDATE: I somehow forgot to mention that during and after the commercial, there was an older lady in my building that was having a shit fit. Apparently she has the thought that our building is now cursed and a lot of bad luck will happen. People will start jumping off the building and killing themselves, etc… blah blah blah. I personally don’t believe in that voodoo shit, but that lady was giving everyone a hard time about it, especially the cool guard guy I like. If it is true (which of course it is not) then I hope she is the first to jump. Dumb bitch.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Media, Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.